Inwood

RAIL BONDING Subway nerds will relish the elevated tracks at the Dyckman Street stop and the 190th Street exit’s original IND sign, below.

Plus:

• Endangered zones: Manhattan

The tip-top of Manhattan is the borough’s last frontier, and one of its last (relatively) affordable parts. It’s also the most mountainous area. Not hilliest—mountainous. Run, if you can, up the steps from Broadway and Dyckman Street to the “outlook” at Fort Tryon Park, where the Cloisters await. That feels like a mountain (it’s actually the second-highest natural point in Manhattan, at 260 feet above sea level).

The area has many notable quirks. For instance, cross the Harlem River and you’ll find yourself on the mainland—yet not out of Manhattan. This is Marble Hill, orphaned after the redirection of the river and the filling of a ship canal in 1916. Transit buffs, meanwhile, can have a field day. Manhattan’s elevated train lines, which first appeared in the 1880s, gradually disappeared as the subways took over; the last major El, over Third Avenue, closed in 1955. Yet, unbeknownst to most Manhattanites, stretches of El are still around; here in Inwood, the 1 train emerges from what is one of the subways’ deepest tunnels, at Dyckman Street, and proceeds—following an elevated line built in 1907—over Nagle Avenue, Tenth Avenue, Broadway and the Harlem River, ending on the western edge of the Bronx’s Van Cortlandt Park. The 191st Street station is also among the system’s deepest, constructed after the task of tunneling through solid schist. At the 190th Street exit on the Fort Washington Avenue side, you’ll find a couple of original IND relics from the 1930s: Highly stylized light stanchions illuminate the path from the street to the subway entrance, near an original Independent Subway System sign, about ten feet in height.

Older still: the Dyckman Farmhouse(212-304-9422, dyckmanfarmhouse.org), which has been at Broadway and what is now West 204th Street since about 1784, and is a rare Manhattan artifact from the era immediately following the Revolutionary War (fires and relentless renewal have taken their toll). The house was built by William Dyckman, grandson of Jan Dyckman, an immigrant from Westphalia who established a farm in the area in 1661. The house is appointed with 18th- and 19th-century pieces, while the foundation surrounds a Manhattan-schist outcropping: You can see a board game carved into the rock, presumably by the Dyckman children, in the cellar kitchen. Clay pipes, wine bottles and even buttons from soldiers’ uniforms have been found on the grounds (during the Revolution the house was used as a military encampment).

From the Dyckman House, take West 204th to Tenth Avenue and continue on it south to a driveway just north of P.S. 5. Look for a wood-chipped walkway a short distance up the drive; follow it to a clearing and soon you’ll see the Harlem River inlet known as Sherman Creek. In the 1950s, the creek was home to a number of boat clubs, but thanks to sewer overflow, it started silting over in the 1960s, and dredging proved too much trouble; most boat owners abandoned their vessels, and the wrecks sat there until recently, when the New York Restoration Project cleaned everything up. Today, it’s an isolated lagoon providing views of the Bronx bluffs and of the dome of the Hall of Fame at Bronx Community College.

RURAL ROUTE The Dyckman Farmhouse dates to about 1784.

A short ways north, aficionados of the forgotten can locate a small treasure. Into the early 1900s, New York City streets had thousands of iron posts topped by gaslight fixtures, tended to by lamplighters who made daily rounds. Though gas-powered lights can still be found in the front yards of many private homes around town, the pole at Broadway where it meets Isham and West 211th Streets is one of just two public ones in the city that have survived (the other is at the end of Patchin Place in Greenwich Village; that one has been fitted with an electric bulb).

A quick jaunt away, at Broadway and West 215th, sits the curious Seaman Arch. The 35-foot-tall structure, which has attracted more than its share of graffiti writers, stands humbled behind the aluminum-grilled gates of a closed auto-parts shop. This is the last remnant (other than a local avenue name) of the Seaman Estate, acquired in 1851 by the wealthy Seaman brothers, John and Valentine, who were descendants of sea captain John Seaman, a New World arrival in 1653. The brothers constructed the arch in 1855 to mark the entrance of their property.

One more forgotten icon remains. Climb those steps in Fort Tryon Park but bypass the Cloisters and walk through the park, down Cabrini Boulevard past Paterno Village (and its stunning Palisades views) to a strange, undeveloped region. If you peer long enough through the tangled trees, you’ll locate the remnants of a Greek templelike shelter. Hardly anyone knows it anymore as Inspiration Point, one of the city’s lovers’ lanes, but in 1925, Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart paid homage in the song “Manhattan”: “A short vacation / On Inspiration Point we’ll spend / And in the station house we’ll end.”

Subway: 1 to 191st St, Dyckman St, 207th St or 215th St. Bus: Bx7, Bx20 or M100.